She isn’t herself. There’s something odd in what she said. She’s back at the edge of the building watching Monty’s house and hoping I will go, I can see it in the settled way she lays a khaki sleeve along a black iron fence, two parallel chevrons, corporal, U.S. Army.
She comes back. She says, I would have been in it anyway.
I don’t believe her, there’s something wrong in what she’s said. Come on, there’s a Mexican place a few blocks up, I’m probably staying at Sub’s if she wants to bunk in tourist there, surely she remembers the Bach sweatshirt, the man with the two kids?
I fall flat.
He may have to go into hospital tomorrow for tests.
She doesn’t know what to say, but she does not smile.
Look, I say, it’s not fair to me: and this makes her look toward her lookout post seeing Reid’s face with its premature lines from the corners of his mouth up to his wide nostrils: or did she hear me? Her silence refutes me better than Dagger’s words in the domestic scene my words call up when she and he had been out to the hardware-housewear shop where I bought Andsworth’s French vegetable slicer run by (if not owned by) the white girl and the man from Ghana who always closed for a long lunch even on Saturday so Dagger and Jenny came back without the wine glasses Lorna had sent them out for and in response to Dagger’s later toast to not taking Jenny seriously she downed a whole old-fashioned glass of Liebfraii-milch Dagger had got us a case of cheap, but the toast arose from Dagger saying fairness was the great empty virtue, Jenny saying fairness was one reason he stayed in England, Dagger answering with his mouth full of veal and rice that fairness was like loyalty, Jenny saying he didn’t take her seriously, Dagger choking on rice and laughter, reaching for his almost empty glass.
Jenny’s silence leaves fairness in my mouth but she comes back from the edge of the building and she tells me my life is in danger. Her phrase is solemn, she is a child again for me—my life—manageable.
Oh she could tell me some things but for God’s sake now go, go—please go.
I say she’s in danger too and it’s my fault. A police car parks across the street, both cops watching us.
At least get Reid to get my suitcase out of Monty’s.
She will call me at Sub’s—she promises—what’s his surname? What’s his address?—go.
I say she hasn’t told me anything new, I am in danger from many sides.
She asks if I looked at Jane Allott’s cast when she came in from the park and showed it to Tessa.
To see Dirk Bogarde’s signature and Reid’s?
And Nash!
Nash from the softball game?
Oh that little bloody softball game!
Sweat off a Sunday hangover.
Well Hyde Park wasn’t the only park in London. Nash was at Golders Hill that Saturday we had lunch at Tessa’s father’s. Nash came up to the bench. Jane was telling Jenny about the signatures, and Will was pretending he wasn’t interested. A clan chieftain (serious, slow, extravagant with money I guessed; pan downward to bare legs spread at his desk in Edinburgh on which Jane’s moldy cast lay like an independent object); Dirk Bogarde (eyebrows raised, kindly scribbling in the middle of a city); Reid—Reid’s handsome! said Jane.
That hippie! said Will, and Jenny said Reid was an artist and a man and Will could learn a thing or two from him about political consciousness, and Will said it was Dad who’d mentioned that hat. Jane reached her cast across: Look, you’re right here with him, Will—my Daddy said he’s in the theater. And then Jenny said Will’s signature was a carbon copy of his father’s, and at this Will got up and walked away down the path, though here standing over Jane was the man with the colored rings who asked if he too could sign—and had trouble getting his byro to run ink into the fibers of Jane’s cast, saying, If at first you don’t succeed—and then, Show that to your mother when you get home; and when he walked off he had an odd lean, like a limp you couldn’t quite pinpoint.
Jenny is back to her post. I follow just to where looking east one can see enough of the south side of King Street to see Monty’s house.
I talk to her again: But Will recognized him surely—Will was the one who called out your nose is bleeding at the softball game we filmed. And you yourself must have known Nash.
I step further to see clear down King to where I phoned June, and Jenny steps back and I grab her arm and she tries to pull away, and the cops are watching and I try to shush her, though her voice is low, and it is appearances I’m trying to save, as she was when she hid a snapshot I now knew must be of Paul and Reid together.
Her accent is native London: Oh you imagine I know him just from your baseball game—well who do you think Reid in fact was looking at down the South Ken tunnel the day he signed Jane’s cast?
The burly Frenchman like me bare-headed has turned into the far end of King (where Jan and Jerry and Jenny turned and near where I kept watch under the one or possibly two helicopters and phoned June). I duck back.
Behind me the cop in the right-hand seat which in England would be the driver’s seat (as in Sweden till recently) gets out and stands up into the street. I raise my free hand and there is a cab which overshoots me by just half a length, and as I get into it I say over my shoulder, But I bet you don’t know who Nash was with that day.
Incremona, the answer came, but not from Jenny.
Oh the retreating scene through the cab’s back window! Jenny alone, the cop looking at Jenny, then easing back into the squad car—Incremona! I answered myself: Incremona: Incremona had been the one in the South Ken tunnel with Nash: Incremona: the man at whose command Kate rang up Savvy’s farewell party to pass on to Gene the news that Jan’s red jaguar had been pinched by Cartwright but Kate passed the news to Nell, who did not tell Nash (hovering on Savvy’s bedroom threshold) but did later tell her husband Gene, the middle Flint brother, the uncertain one who in his younger brother Paul’s hut on the slopes of Mount Clisham could commit my diary to the fire with Jenny’s strange phrases on it more than clues when but a few moments before he had grimaced as if at some violation when his older brother Jack tore off a blank half-page of it so I could have a scrap to jot down compass bearings.
No matter where it took me I would go to the end. Even if only to find myself alone then with someone else’s profit system, or state of mind, or shrunken heart. Or opening at last an air letter I did not trust, that a friend named Dagger DiGorro had expressed to Monty’s. Or far from Jenny (who must have known about Len anyway but did not know about the Frenchman). Far from family and from our insulated though not friendless life in England. Far from things warm or even serious. Far from gray film or dry froth left on the soap by my son Will. Far from Isambard Kingdom Brunel fresh from nearly drowning his head in an unforeseen pool during a fire on the maiden voyage from Bristol (but not by a long shot to New York) of a great ship he had designed, the Great Western, whose boiler laggings had been laid on so near the furnace flues that, being of felt and red lead, they had ignited. And far from the interesting differences between a stand-up shower with its advantages of moving water and quick and thorough rinsing, and a tie-down bath. There one can speak to one’s dry, attendant wife on many subjects, the space program, the Vietnam war, the concept of Hindu Māyā, even if three weeks before as a bitchy bon voyage to Corsica she called the film half-baked, though in fairness to myself I had so vividly foreseen screw-ups in shot-selection, in cutting, in the issue of color and black and white, and in our story-line, that, as far back as May, I had said to Cosmo that if we didn’t watch it we could get into trouble—which I at once saw was misplaced frankness with a person of Cosmo’s insecurities, for he nodded sagely with a twisted grin glad to let me seem to put down our film when in fact all I was doing was politely not putting down his own grandiose advice that we use cartridge loops and kindred tricks.
And so instead of trailing Jan Tuesday right on into her brother’s house to find Paul at last, I had instead been found by Paul on Thursday and been picked
up with John in what was clearly someone’s plan. As systematic as Jack Flint checking me out by inquiring of that Sunday armchair quarterback Red Whitehead what territory I worked and what my work was like and what my interests were. And Red “So call me Red!”—though he answered the phone “This is Mr. Whitehead”—welcomed the chance to tie into the great multiple field of impinging informations to dump his bit into the memory bank, manila folder and all, shredded for better digestion, complete with my having failed to exploit the Bristol liquid-crystal market.
But it’s Jack’s! I cried, and Paul Flint flicked his head around, then back to the red light that has been oncoming through the swash of three cabs Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday this terminal October week.
But wait: I didn’t mean this was Jack’s taxi; I meant that Jan had told me her erstwhile husband was doing a science film for young people and he was doing it with Jack Flint, and I meant that Red had said he was now into audio-visuals for schools and that Red had tried to put me on hold when I asked if he knew Phil Aut: so that, improbable as it seemed, I would be surprised if Jack Flint did not have a controlling interest in the very science firm for which Red provided executive noise and I was the erstwhile U.K. rep. So I had been working part-time for Jack perhaps. But if he and Phil were doing that film together, why wasn’t Jack behind my film too? Jan did not have the imagination to take that further step—she had been busy saving the world or bringing understanding to it. You might as well try to convey my shtip of understanding to Tessa’s father: Lorna gets up to leave, depressed by Dudley more than his nastiness; and so it turns out we’re leaving with the Polish woman I’ve been saying goodbye to, while Tessa, who didn’t get through to her clan chief, examines Jane’s cast so closely she does not even say goodbye to us, and in the front garden, half of which Queenie Stone faithfully weeds each damp English week, I say to Lorna Oh I am going to the film after all, and she says Dagger can’t see you after all, and I say You didn’t put anything on Will’s nose, and she says Jenny’s date was called off too, she can come, but Jenny says I’m not sure: and Tessa’s father’s front door unlatches and swings in and Tessa runs out toward us as if we’ve stolen something, but only to ask if she and Jane can come to the cinema tonight.
But the cast! the cast!
I didn’t say this out loud and still Paul looked round.
Something was wrong with Paul’s cab. Less swing and swash but no increased structural tightness. A shock gone? A waterbed losing water? Brunel would have the door open at once and be two-thirds out hanging under the body, the back of his brain six inches off the street whose potholes, ridges, and cracks at this speed had a liquid flow of which in turn the great man pushing through cave-in, shipwreck, and fire to success would be unaware, giving his undivided attention now to this cab’s under-carriage, not (or not yet) the larger related problems of paving material and traffic stress, or the soluble and insoluble problem of his own gravity, for I am inside the cab’s passenger compartment holding his feet.
Now my own Māyā proverb may be 75 percent right—a shtip in time must suffice to be merely its own reward. However, that Sabbath stab in Tessa’s father’s front hall reached also some system of attention that felt less my own than borrowed or shared—whereby the message on Jane’s itchy cast came to me through others: and the message was that the woman Nash and Incremona had come to meet on June 27 in the pedestrian subway leading under the Science Museum to the South Kensington tube had been Tessa Allott, and by some improbable accident she had been proxied unknowingly by Dudley and Jane.
This was a message fleeting enough; for the cast had hardly any future: two days after our Sabbath lunch July 3 and within hours of Dagger’s call to say Corsica was on after all, Jane’s cast was hacked and scissored off in Dudley’s presence while Jane pretended agony at every cut. But she did not pretend when she looked at last at her mended arm. She ran a finger over the crease in the soft flesh above the elbow where the cast had reached, and she looked at the diaphanous pallor against the warm color of her other arm that had been exposed to London sun and Edinburgh rain and the Channel winds of the Kent coast where she had visited a schoolmate whose parents had a cottage in Deal. You see, Dudley talked to me. I would sometimes guess why, but I didn’t know; and he’d have been embarrassed if I’d asked.
Tuesday, July 6, we rested in the water at the far end of the pool, an elbow lying on the tile, feet idly treading for pleasure, and Dudley told me how he had not liked the doctor’s rough handling of Jane’s cast but when she looked at her arm he had felt something else, a shtip—he stopped, he smiled the scholar’s quick mad smile to himself—a shtip indeed, a shtip—for her reaction hurt him, her arm was a thing the way it is when circulation gets cut off and you have to pick your arm up and hold it while you shift your position in bed, and what hurt her hurt him.
But even more idly than I was treading, I was staring idly at his pale and hairy stomach enlarged in the tile-blue-tinted water, a lens for Corsica—not so much Dag’s call the night before to announce that it was on again he was glad to say, but more what I’d proposed: the women looking ten years older than the men, a woman flogging Napoleon souvenirs, a university student in a café explaining in English to an American the meaning of the ’68 slogan THE MORE I MAKE LOVE THE MORE I WANT TO MAKE THE REVOLUTION, American dropouts living in the coastal caves, sharp CUT to a construction crew wiring sticks of dynamite apparently (because of the sharp cut) on top of the very cliff that housed the caves, and finally (or as far as I had gone with Dagger on the phone) a Corsican breaking open his fowling piece and cleaning it and laying it back in the boot of his car.
Thus preoccupied, I wondered only later if my reason for not asking Dudley why he talked to me openly the way he did was that I was afraid he would reply in his direct way something that on the contrary would embarrass me, or lead if you will beyond the inherent reward of Dudley’s candor on certain accepted subjects.
He is an honorable man.
There in the water he said, Well I couldn’t let her go to the doctor on her own with Queenie, could I?
But he would never have said, That bitch of a wife of mine had to pick yesterday morning to go to the British Museum to try to identify the person on whom the romantic hero of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White is based who also may well have given his name or most of it to the heroine of that book.
But Dudley—as a combination of waters now washed glimmeringly into my view—could embarrass Tessa when he wanted. Yes, that Sabbath shtip apart from its inherent reward had its 25 percent of incremental information gossiping through gate after gate like a digital sum to the hot and nice but (because Will had not washed the tub) faintly scummy bath water from which I delivered to Lorna my two-part definition of Hindu Māyā and she for her part told how Dudley had angered Tessa at that party by asking Dag and interrupting to ask again and yet again who was this Nash, eh? who was Nash?
A query I now saw came from Jane’s cast, destroyed to reveal the true limb it had been made to mend—first inspected—inspected rather casually I should have guessed that Sunday, July 3, while Tessa washed the teacups and Jane looked up the movie they would see with us that night.
But Jenny did not go after all. She phoned Reid, and they met, and the quid pro quo of their meeting I imagined now in Paul’s cab that had gone strange on us this October Thursday in New York just as accurately as Jenny herself told me when I got it out of her Saturday.
But why did Nash want to call himself to Tessa’s attention?
Mike! I exclaimed.
Mike indeed. Mike who had heard me answer Mary Napier that the name of my friend who visited in Edinburgh was Tessa Allott.
But Mike had heard this in Ajaccio, whereas on the Sunday Nash autographed Jane’s cast Dagger and I had not even been to Corsica. A valve had opened with a blink like the Mercurial god of film, cutting some prefigured Corsica into a Marvelous Country House as yet unshot, and some coordinate part of me had leaned naturally toward that v
acuum blink, but must say No, and in lieu of an answer ask the question Why did Dagger change his mind and say on Monday night, July 5, that we were going to Corsica after all?
I knew only what others knew.
As you who have me know, I did not seek top secrets from the bottom of my heart. But that is where they seemed to fall, and I had no hard-hat to leave above the grating’s grid. I become all these data shredded into their oscillations. A Zen voice from Lorna’s crisis of the late fifties comes home with her: it is late at night: she stands over me still in her coat, I look up at the smell of her soap and the damp rain on her shoulders: I love her: she smiles a brave matinée smile that asks for an understanding no man can give, no real man, or maybe just not me: she quotes her koan: Open yourself as wide as the sky: she laughs silently.
Open myself as wide as the sky?
But that was not Brunel’s way. Consider the astronaut. Unlike those wartime shipyard workers who now know that the asbestos they breathed a generation ago may yield a fiery carcinoma, the astronaut cannot know what lesions of the eye or breakdowns of the head may hit him in his earthly autumn from those flicker-flashes radiating by night through his helmet and out the other side into the unresisting space of his late youth. Meanwhile we do what we can. We look at the unmediated glare of the sun in space and devise a visor and rethink certain properties of imperviousness in gold. We look at the fact of heart shrinkage in the weightlessness of space where it works less; and it is possible to do something; we measure stress in the elevated levels of activity of a nerve-transmitter called catecholamine related to hormones. And Brunel with his banged head sunk in an overflow that has collected—Brunel breathing air and water and fire—will think not of the devoted waiting wife, or his centrifugal solution to the threat of suffocation by a coin caught in his throat in the bosom of his family, or his dawn horseback ride to Bath thence to survey the valley of the Avon and the soft hill clay along a canal, but thinks rather at once about what caused the fire on the Great Western—and the clear answer in his new Great Britain is David Napier’s new feed-water heater, not to stop the excess heat around the funnel but to use it. I do not wish for a technology of wedlock. Still there are times—a problem could have been stated, a pain received as a message. Dagger got Alba’s phone call at the école in Ajaccio and at once saw that even if her false labor did not last, she had to know he was on his way back to London—though in Paul’s October cab I wondered if Dagger had used the false labor (which must have been nerves because Alba took methodical care not to overtax her body) to get us out of Corsica before I poked into something that was not our business. Now Brunel’s Great Britain had another problem on her maiden voyage to New York. She lost her way and ran aground on the coast of Ireland, and at daybreak the skipper looked for the Isle of Man and saw the Mountain of Mourn, but this was because there were errors in a new chart that had not existed in the old. More important, this was a mishap that Brunel’s unprecedented longitudinal iron girders (like his earlier timber viaduct that survived the head-on collision of two trains) could withstand but not forestall. And so in the transfer from the old chart to the new the Great Britain (51 feet broad, 289 feet long between perpendiculars) survived, and so did Brunel’s name, which was enhanced.
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